A multimedia journalist' blog

My name is Dorothee Danedjo Fouba.I am a Tech Community Builder, a Multimedia Journalist, Media Education’ Engineer and Blogger.When I was 10 I wanted to be my own boss and to save life through medicine.I start contributing to Mozilla in September 2014 when I was incubated at Mozilla Offices in Silicon Valley during the Techwomen program.I work as aMozilla Rep/Mentor and Campaign Manager helping organizing communities in Cameroon and Africa by teaching and doing advocacy on different initiatives and programs provided at Mozilla.I am proud of Mozillians involved in Cameroon&Africa because of their great achievements and results. I am also proud of organizations and communities who have all contributed to my personal and professional growth. It’s a good blessing to share leadership skills, networking experiences, training tools&technics and to get back great results and big communities from People sensitized.The biggest obstacle I have faced was bridging the gap between my literary background and appropriating STEM like coding skills and practices. Adding to that It was a big challenge to move toward french and english system. Hopefully I am from a country which use these two languages as officials, but have more than 200 local languages.My inspiration at Mozilla has increased after meeting 4 wonderful women: Larissa Brown Shapiro, Lizz Noonan, Emma Irwin and Mitchell Baker. People I met in some Mozilla advocacy and sensitization events I organized in my country and region also inspired me. They helped me to try to be better than now and to adjust my thinking and projects.My advice to women is seize the opportunity, take the risk! Don’t be afraid on beginning a new challenge. You need to be focused on your objectives, Try to learn by listening to others, Update your mindset every time after being in contact with inspiring and experienced people, Stay humbled and have&keep faith in God.

Within my holidays, I spent some favorite hours for empowering and supporting girls and women in STEM fields in Cameroon. I made time within December 2015 and January 2016 for youth and women. Hopefully, I experienced lot of support from local populations, community leaders, teachers and from such inspiring people around the country. Concretely, I made:

A Technovation huge field trip in 3 of 10 Regions of Cameroon from January 8th to January 19th: Far North, North and Adamawa. The northern Regions of Cameroon are the one which are facing realities of Boko Haram Attacks these last months and people experienced these manifestations of terrorism since 2015 there. But the interesting thing there is that in 2015 I registered with mentors and coaches from these regions 13 teams (65 girls) of the 23 counting for Cameroon Challenge there. They made amazing results there: 6 of them made it to the Technovation Regional Pitch in Cameroon, 5 in the Worlwide quater-final and 1 to the Worlwide Semi-final. Participants are all young girls from 10 to 18 years old who don’t know before the program how to code. Now they are literate in Apps coding and they are building mobile application for solving problem of their direct area of living. The field trip I made was to recognized efforts made by students, mentors and coaches in 2015 challenge, for sensitizing them and recruiting new competitors for Technovation 2016 challenge. Code Girl Movies were diffused on these occasion and skils for using Mit App Inventor and Technovation platforms also have been shared. I shared there with about 15 different secondary schools, with more than 1000 attendees in total.

A big mentoring program for young girls in Cameroon named « Nanas Awards », an initiative of another US Exchange Alumnae from Cameroon, Fidele Djebba. Within the program of December 21st to 22nd, I had a special speaking time with 200 girls from 10 regions of Cameroon for sharing my story and experiences with them in Yaounde. The most interesting things was the sharing tips time for building a project and business plan. I faced there a big surprise there…having more than 200 people singing « Happy birthday to you » just for me and having gifts from kids. Now girls are building their project and we had know within social medias and email and interesting discussion about their special projects.

A great Mozilla Advocacy campaign in Cameroon for kids, youth and women for Northern Regions. With support of WoMoz Members, FSA, KidZilla and Teach the Web trainers from Northern Regions, we recruited lot of people for dedicated initiatives of Mozilla. We are now building a national strategic plan with others regions of Cameroon for growing our community and help contributors to be more active in worldwide activities.

A special 2016 TechWomen Alumnae Coaching Session Call week for Women in Africa. As you know, 2016 Techwomen recruiting phase is in progress and for helping women to improve their application, I organized some One to One Video Call with 8 women in Tech, 6 from Cameroon, 1 from Middle-East countries, 1 from West-African Countries. The main objectives of that Calls was to share with them my own experience of Techwomen program, in which the program consists on, and to help them with tips to fill well their application’s form for the 2016 selection.

I am Grateful to God for this special time spent for impacting people around me. I am Thankful to wonderful Teachers & Administration staff of Secondary schools in Cameroon, Technovation Mentors and Coaches, Womoz, FSA and Mozilla Cameroon Cordinators in these differents regions, friends, family& colleagues for the unexpected and important support. A special thanks to TechWomen, Technovation Cameroon and Mozilla.

We’re in the early 1990s, somewhere in Africa. Children, not yet 10 years old, are dreaming big. Olivier wants to create a « Super Mario » for his friends when he becomes a man. Joëlle is still a little girl but wants to invent a Cartoon Strip. Many African children still to be born will also grow up with hopes and dreams of becoming technological creators and inventors. Today they are in their thirties, some of them are younger than that and they held this gap in the 3rd millennium, in an area where they do not actually imagined in their childhood: the web, new technologies, ICT.

Out of 55 web and IT projects collected in Africa from August 2014 to January 2015, five Cameroonian success stories are highlighted out of six total. Olivier Madiba has managed to launch a video game firm « Kiro’o Games », producer of the first video game from Cameroon « Aurion, the legacy of Kori-Odan. » Here is a demo of this video game.

Joëlle Ebongue, better known by her Artist name Elyons, is the creator of « The Diary of Ebene Duta », a cartoon strip originally distributed on the web via social media. She is sharing her experience in Crowdfunding.

Neaby, Arthur Zang is working on a tablet for cardiology medical use, « Cardiopad« . In Buea, at a place called « Silicon Mountain »,another project, the digital wallet « Pursar » of Otto Isong and team is in development. These four projects have followed the funding model used by the Afropolitan webzine created by young Cameroonians, « FashizBlack ». One of the Co-founder of this webzine, Paola Audrey Ndengue, is sharing their Crowdfunding Story.

The common denominator of these diverse initiatives and technologies success is Crowdfunding.

Crowdfunding is a mode of Internet financing which uses the techniques of Web 2.0 known as interactivity, online platforms, blogs, social networking and microblogging spaces.It appeals to the crowd, the greatest number of people and visitors for a project. Then there are four major categories of crowdfunding: donation crowdfunding, reward crowdfunding, credit crowdfunding and equity crowdfunding. Some details on crowdfunding are on this interactive video.

In Africa, the situation is clear, young African entrepreneurs prefer reward crowdfunding and equity crowdfunding. Here is the location of the Top 20 countries in Africa succeeding in Crowdfunding Campaign for web and IT projects.

Young African entrepreneurs use mostly online platforms to replace traditional financial actors such as banks and stock exchanges, because these traditional actors do not always believe on the financial success thanks to the web and ICT. Young Africans Entrepreneurs used some Crowdfunding platforms like Kickstarter, Indiegogo, KissKissBankBank, Ulule, Jumpstart and sometimes to African platforms : Thundafund, VC4Africa, FundaGeek, TechMoola, Mchanga, Zoomaal and many others. This Chart resume their preferences

Churchill Mambe Nanje of Njorku is talking about dificulties and tips for doing a good Crowdfunding Campaign.

Fritz Ekwoge of FeePerfect add his point of view on crowdfunding.

How does it work?

As explained in the last video, you will notice that this method of funding project has a downside if the entrepreneur has a bad reputation online. Fundraising can be unsuccessful if you do not communicate enough about social media and that it has no social media engagement strategy. Some people to remedy this situation are adding digital strategies online, few ordinary activities when you are seeking funding. To succeed in crowdfunding, just follow this graphic.

Process for success in crowdfunding

What is the value add for Africa?

According to the African Development Bank, the unemployment rate in Sub-saharan Africa is 6% then 1% higher than the world. So it is said that over 70% of Africans earn their living from precarious jobs. Only 17% of young workers in low-income countries, mostly situated in Africa, have an employment full time. Also, the World Bank is more alarming to the question: young people represent 60% of all Africans unemployed. Underemployment rate is 82% with 70% of young Africans living below the internal poverty line, less than $ 2 a day. In Cameroon, for example, official statistics show 13% unemployment and 70% underemployment rate by Strategy Paper for Growth and Employment. The informal sector is the main source of employment with 90.5% of workers.

These data demonstrated that web and IT is like manna for Africa. Because Internet and mobile phones have increasing high penetration rates. More than 200 million Internet users, 79 million on social media or 18% of internet penetration and 67% of people who are connected on mobile phone in the continent.

Internet and Mobile Data in Africa by Dorothydaf (C) 2015

In addition, the creation of web and IT products became an African specialty (InternetWorldStats). Young entrepreneurs have flooded the mobile market, online payments, video games, and web programming. Above all, creators are adopting in mass the methods of crowdfunding. Currently in Africa, followers of crowdfunding are in the dozens, not only in web technology sectors and the results are palpable, as projects materialize beyond childhood dreams into real technical and financial futures

Dorothée Danedjo Fouba

*Article published for African Story Challenge-Business&Technology Cycle*

These are some pictures about the Story « A Multimedia Journalist’Blog » is writing for the African story Challenge- Business and technology Cycle.

These pictures were taken when we are doing data collection and report in field of action in Buea, Yaounde and Douala (Cameroon), between November and December 2014. For more details about this article on crowdfunding, a post was published in french in September 2014. In few words, an economy of this blog post: